Quotes from Mary Roach

Most of them students from the nearby University of Dayton...

Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don't bend.

And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready. For

freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer.

The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months."*

it is the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, that gave us the poet Ovid, who in the Metamorphoses deplored the eating of animals, and the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a day when the life of an animal would be valued as highly as that of a person, and Saint Francis, who once petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor to scatter grain on fields on Christmas Day and give the crested larks a feast.

Which ones, in short, make the difference in the consumer's mouth and mind? "And you can't ask the consumer," says Langstaff. "You ask the consumer, 'Why does it taste better?' They say, 'Because I like it better.'" The consumer's flavor lexicon is tiny: yum and yuck.

For most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet. Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE agent of dietary change is the adulated eater—the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. "Normally disgusting substances or objects that are associated with admired . . . persons cease to be disgusting and may become pleasant

It starts as an appetizer typically. That's low risk. Then it migrates to an entrée dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.

Unlike filets and stewing meats, organs look like what they are: body parts. That's another reason we resist them. "Organs," says Rozin, "remind us of what we have in common with animals." In the same way a corpse spawns thoughts of mortality, tongues and tripe send an unwelcome message: you too are an organism, a chewing, digesting sack of guts.

People who claim lactose intolerance tend to also voice a belief that they're gluten-intolerant. Usually with no evidence of either.

The Inuit, at the time I visited Igloolik, had no tradition of keeping animals as companions. A sled dog was more or less a piece of equipment. When I told Makabe Nartok that I had a cat, he asked, "What do you use it for?" In America, pets are family, never fare.

compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...

He recovers and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: the formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive shit-starter.

Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

Hydrogen sulfide is as lethal, molecule for molecule, as cyanide. This may explain why humans evolved such exquisite sensitivity to its smell.

Death doesn't have to be boring.

panel applicants at the initial screening were asked not only to describe the cat foods but also to rate them according to how much they liked them. (The average rating, I am gobsmacked to report, fell between "like mildly" and "neither like nor dislike.")

there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people's saliva.

And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you're not forgotten.

Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus.

Thanks to this unusual data set, we now know that humans prefer cat food with a tuna or herbal flavor over cat food with the flavor descriptors "rancid," "offaly," "cereal," or "burnt." But humans, as we are about to see, are not cats.

We were unable to obtain any lesbians," Pomeroy says, as though perhaps they hadn't been in season, or his paperwork wasn't in order.)